After Math: Market fluctuations

Steve Jobs' open letter about DRM and music yesterday definitely got a lot of tongues wagging, but there's one group that might want to re-read what he wrote. Bit Player (you gotta scroll down to the bottom of the post) reports that our old friends at the RIAA issued a response today lauding Apple's offer to license FairPlay as a "welcome breakthrough" that would be a "real victory for fans, artists and labels." There's only one problem: Jobs didn't offer to license FairPlay at all. In fact, he makes it pretty clear that he thinks that switching to an open model for DRM wouldn't work ("Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies.") and that the best option is to eliminate DRM altogether. We already knew that the majors are totally in denial about this stuff, but to pretend that his letter (however motivated) was anything other than a broadside against DRM is silly.